Written on 15/09/2020
The language of wine
Wine has its own language. It is discussed as much as it is tasted. From the erotic to the scientific, the wine lexicon is vast and sometimes mysterious. We've heard the terms a thousand times without ever admitting we don't understand them. Here's a selection of words you need to know and master to talk about "wine" without getting your feet stuck in the vine...
NOBLE ROT
This delicious oxymoron refers to a fungus that develops on grapes in the late season, helping them to develop complex aromas. It often produces sweet wines , because the later the grapes are harvested, the sweeter they are, and Botrytis (the other name for noble rot) concentrates the juice in the grapes. We owe some fine Sauternes and delicious Alsatiandrinks to it...
THE TASTE OF LIGHT
We'd love it to be a quality, but unfortunately it's a wine flaw. It mainly affects white and sparkling wines, such as Champagne, but also rosés, and can sometimes attack reds. As the name suggests, it's the taste the wine takes on after too much or too long exposure to light, whether natural or artificial. It will first erase the fruity notes and then add a very unpleasant taste of cooked cabbage or badly dried linen... Hence the importance of storing your bottles in a cellar or in the darkest possible place!
THE ANGELS' SHARE
Of course, the angels' share is much more important and visible in the cellars of spirits, but it also exists for wine. It's the portion of alcohol that evaporates naturally during barrel aging. It has blackened many a stone in the Armagnac and Cognac regions, making it easy for the authorities to spot a clandestine distillery...
GOULEYANT
It's a supple, easy-drinking wine. However, it is used less and less, even though in Les Visiteurs, Jacquouille, who drinks modern wine in a plastic bottle for the first time (and therefore certainly less bitter than the wine of the Middle Ages), exclaims, "This wine is easy to drink, although a little claret!
Here are a few dog-eared pages in the never-ending wine dictionary. We could have gone on to talk about chaptalization, seductive or velvety wines... but that's only part of the story!
